I recently heard an Ohio coal worker voice his community's fearful apprehension about the future of their jobs and the upcoming election. They, he declared, will vote for whichever candidate has a "better" stance on coal -- meaning the candidate who will help support the coal mining/burning industry.
I completely understand the emotional resistance. Environmental health -- specifically climate change -- is neither a sexy nor a happy subject; it sounds mystifyingly abstract and woefully distant and hypothetical. The present is always more compelling -- and motivating -- than the future. When viewed through a personalized lens, the choice between having a job (especially one at which I am already proficient and experienced) and not having one (or having to retrain for a new one in which I will have to start again at the bottom and work my way up) is a no-brainer. Climate change is "out there." Today I have to feed my family. That, and the broader nationalist concern over energy independence reinforces that coal miner's protectiveness. The excitable polyvalence of the issues unfortunately intersect at the point of abdication (at best) and strident opposition (at worst). Unfortunately it is a fool's crusade. And a suicidal one.
It turns out that the atmosphere has a slow fuse. There is a 30-year gap between human behaviors and environmental consequences -- sort of an invitation to procrastination. As one scientist I heard over the weekend put it, what we are experiencing today -- drought, intense heat, catastrophic weather events -- are not the result of what we are doing right now. They are the result of what we did 30 years ago.
30 years ago when the CO2 levels in the atmosphere were 340 parts per million -- 10 ppm below the 350 ppm scientists believe to be the maximum safe level. Today's climatological issues represent the result of an average temperature rise of approximately 1.5-degrees. Now 30 years after those 340 ppm "good old days", our current CO2 ppm is 392, and scientists are anticipating that those kinds of levels (that are rising unabated) will nudge the mercury upwards 4-6 degrees. Given what we are seeing with a 1.5-degree rise, doesn't 4-6 sound fun?
So when will get around to talking about this in any meaningful way? Why is this -- to the extent that it is a public issue at all -- somehow a partisan political issue and not a globally impassioned human issue? Last night was the first Presidential debate. Subject didn't come up. Seldom does in churches, either, let alone households. This isn't a crisis that we are goingnto avert with reusable grocery bags, as symbolically important as they may be. When will we have the courage to look those honestly hard working coal miners in the eye, the same way we did to all those tobacco farmers several years ago, and frankly say, "Your job is obsolete. The earth simply can't afford it any more"?
We can no longer be so economically, politically short-sighted as to think that "any job will do," any more than we can intelligently kill ourselves in the name of security.
Didn't someone once define insanity as doing the same thing while expecting different results?
If that's the case, we're going to need a bigger asylum. Hopefully it will be air-conditioned. Solar powered.
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